Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Thursday 29 November
12:45 PM - 1:15 PM
The obsession with the perfect diet, germ-free homes, selective socialising, harm minimisation through choice of the correct fabrics, risk minimisation with helmets, knee and elbow pads, stranger danger and safe searches, baby gym and co-ordination augmentation is suffocating our children and oppressing women.
There has never been more time, energy and thought spent on the raising of babies, toddlers and children, and it is detrimental, counterproductive and narcissistic. Join 1970s parent Catherine Deveny, as she espouses the benefits of benevolent neglect, quality boredom and independence as a result of parental indifference, and rails against the obsession with child-rearing that is leading to a dysfunctional co-dependence – which inevitably affects us all.
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Sometimes there’s nothing better than a good rant. Every Thursday, the Wheeler Centre hosts an old-fashioned Speakers’ Corner in the middle of the city, where writers and thinkers can have their say on the topics that won’t let them sleep at night.
Featuring some of our most compelling voices across just about every sector of human endeavour you can imagine, the themes dominating Lunchbox/Soapbox are proudly idiosyncratic. BYO lunch. Ideas provided.
Featuring
Catherine Deveny
Catherine Deveny has been a comedian, writer and professional speaker for 23 years.
She’s the author of seven books and over 1,000 columns for the Age newspaper, and is an ABC regular. She has appeared on Q&A five times — sitting next to John Elliott, Tony Abbott, Corey Bernardi, Peter Dutton and Archbishop Peter Jensen.
Deveny has performed five one-woman shows in the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and has been named one of the Top 100 Most Influential Melbournians. Her charity and activist work includes public schools, public housing, feminism, atheism, asylum seekers, child abuse in the Catholic Church and homelessness.
She’s a keen commuter cycling ambassador and the co-founder of Pushy Women. She is the creator of the enormously successful Gunnas Writing Masterclasss — running 50 classes in less than 18 months.
You’ll find her performing everywhere from debates at Melbourne Town Hall with Julian Burnside to Splendor In the Grass in Byron Bay.
She has never married and lives with her childhood sweetheart in the People's Republic Of Moreland.